The Daily Circuit BlogQuirks, quips and questions off the air2014-11-12T04:16:47Zhttp://blogs.mprnews.org/daily-circuit/feed/atom/WordPressStephanie Curtishttp://blogs.mprnews.org/daily-circuit/?p=19672014-11-12T04:16:47Z2014-11-12T04:16:47ZAmazon’s best books of 2014 list is out. It’s a refreshing mix of high literature, non-fiction, essays, sci-fi, and other genre books. The book of the year is sold out on Amazon at this exact second. (Maybe try your local bookstore?) It’s a debut novel by Celeste Ng called “Everything I Never Told You.”

]]>0Stephanie Curtishttp://blogs.mprnews.org/daily-circuit/?p=19552014-11-04T15:44:19Z2014-11-04T15:31:14ZFor me it was a coloring book with pictures of the Roman gods and goddesses that I picked up at my local grocery store. I fell in love with their exotic names and the beautiful faces. Once I finished coloring every picture, my grandmother said, “You know, you can read books about all those characters.” That was it. I went to the library and within a year I had read every myth at the Arden Hills branch of the Ramsey County Library.

]]>15Kerri Millerhttp://blogs.mprnews.org/daily-circuit/?p=19442014-10-31T20:25:14Z2014-11-03T12:00:20ZI’m in a Roaming and Reading mood– maybe it’s because I don’t have a travel adventure planned until December. Until then, I’m going to let some wonderful novels take me far afield.

]]>0Emily Kaiserhttp://blogs.mprnews.org/daily-circuit/?p=19372014-10-27T20:52:07Z2014-10-27T20:45:13Z9:06: How young libertarians could change American politics

9:45: Op-ed with Jessica Bennett on the rise of employer-paid egg freezing benefits

10:06: Caleb Scharf on the cosmic significance of life on EarthIn his new book, Scharf argues that while life on earth isn’t unique, it is rare to live on a planet so unusually situated and part of such an exclusive club of planetary systems that can support life

10:50: Book pick

11:06: Minnesota schools tackle student mental health

]]>0Stephanie Curtishttp://blogs.mprnews.org/daily-circuit/?p=19342014-10-24T14:38:12Z2014-10-24T14:38:12ZDavid Edwards writes in Wired that American schools are not preparing students for the challenges of the coming decades:

The global climate will continue to change. To save our coastlines, and maintain acceptable living conditions for more than a billion people, we need to discover new science, engineering, design, and architectural methods, and pioneer economic models that sustain their implementation and maintenance. Microbiological threats will increase as our traditional techniques of anti-microbial defense lead to greater and greater resistances, and to thwart these we must discover new approaches to medical treatment, which we can afford, and implement in ways that incite compliance and good health.

Traditional math, reading, and memorization will not give us the tools to solve these problems Edwards argues. What will? A new school of teaching that look less like learning and more like making.

At Harvard University, where I teach, Peter Galison, in History of Science, asks his students make films, to understand science; Michael Chu, in business, brings students to low income regions to learn about social entrepreneurship; Michael Brenner, in Engineering and Applied Science, invites master chefs to help students discover the science of cooking; and Doris Sommer, in Romance Languages, teaches aesthetics by inviting students to effect social and political change through cultural agency.

]]>2Stephanie Curtishttp://blogs.mprnews.org/daily-circuit/?p=19252014-10-17T14:59:27Z2014-10-16T20:00:36ZThe nominees for the National Book Award were announced yesterday. The list of nominees is long. Where do you start? Here are 2 recommendations:

From Euan Kerr:

I’ve always enjoyed dystopian novels, but Emily St. John Mandel’s “Station Eleven” takes the genre to a new literary level. While she creates a world which is enduring horrible calamity in the form of a virulent flu which wipes out most of humanity, her literary creation is of the community of survivors living on in their new reality. It’s a group comprised of ordinary people finding ways of facing its new reality, and re-establishing some form of civilization. It’s not comfortable, but, other than moments of abject terror, Mandel’s story is engrossing in the way it portrays life that’s it’s not that different from our own everyday struggles.

From Kerri Miller:

I opened “All the Light We Cannot See” with a certain amount of wariness: What is there new to say about the experience of World War II? But Anthony Doerr’s characters come from such unexpected places and live such richly detailed days during the war. I feel like he’s ruined me for any other war-time novel!

If you have a favorite novel or work of non-fiction from 2014, share it below.

]]>0Stephanie Curtishttp://blogs.mprnews.org/daily-circuit/?p=19072014-09-26T15:37:01Z2014-09-26T15:37:01ZWe did our Friday Roundtable today about the perils, costs and benefits of living longer. The conversation was inspired by Ezekiel Emanuel’s recent article in The Atlantic provocatively titled “Why I Hope to Die at 75.”

As a counterpoint, read Roger Angell’s lovely article from The New Yorker about being a 93 year-old widower in New York City. He misses his wife. He misses friends. He lists his many ailments — pain from shingles, creaky knees, sore back — but also paints a portrait of a life that sounds lovely and worth living.

I am a world-class complainer but find palpable joy arriving with my evening Dewar’s, from Robinson Cano between pitches, from the first pages once again of “Appointment in Samarra” or the last lines of the Elizabeth Bishop poem called “Poem.” From the briefest strains of Handel or Roy Orbison, or Dennis Brain playing the early bars of his stunning Mozart horn concertos. (This Angel recording may have been one of the first things (my wife) Carol and I acquired just after our marriage, and I hear it playing on a sunny Saturday morning in our Ninety-fourth Street walkup.) Also the recalled faces and then the names of Jean Dixon or Roscoe Karns or Porter Hall or Brad Dourif in another Netflix rerun. Chloë Sevigny in “Trees Lounge.” Gail Collins on a good day. Family ice-skating up near Harlem in the nineteen-eighties, with the Park employees, high on youth or weed, looping past us backward to show their smiles.

Scientists Joe Alcock, Carlo C. Maley, and C. Athena Aktipis reviewed the research on how microbiota affect the brain, and believe there’s a strong case that bacteria influence overall eating behavior. It seems that the bacteria in our guts don’t simply wait for whatever leftovers we have to offer. They actively seek out their preferred meals through tricky deception.

“Microbes have the capacity to manipulate behavior and mood through altering the neural signals in the vagus nerve, changing taste receptors, producing toxins to make us feel bad, and releasing chemical rewards to make us feel good,” Aktipis says.

So the next time you decide to eat a grilled cheese instead of a salad, ask who wants it. You? Or these guys?

]]>0Stephanie Curtishttp://blogs.mprnews.org/daily-circuit/?p=18922014-09-15T18:42:24Z2014-09-15T18:42:24ZIn the New York Times, Michael T. Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, lays out his two biggest worries about the Ebola outbreak. First, that the virus could reach a large urban area where it will spread more quickly than it has in isolated villages. Second, and far more worrisome, that Ebola could mutate and be transmissable through the air:

You can now get Ebola only through direct contact with bodily fluids. But viruses like Ebola are notoriously sloppy in replicating, meaning the virus entering one person may be genetically different from the virus entering the next. The current Ebola virus’s hyper-evolution is unprecedented; there has been more human-to-human transmission in the past four months than most likely occurred in the last 500 to 1,000 years. Each new infection represents trillions of throws of the genetic dice.

If certain mutations occurred, it would mean that just breathing would put one at risk of contracting Ebola. Infections could spread quickly to every part of the globe, as the H1N1 influenza virus did in 2009, after its birth in Mexico.